Coaching with Compassion: Key Takeaways

"Helping People Change" by Richard Boyatzis, Melvin Smith, and Ellen Van Oosten focuses on the idea of positive emotion attractors, which help people to thrive and flourish. By keying in on this aspect of emotional intelligence, coaches can help people creating lasting change in themselves. Having a vision, however, is essential to the process of personal long-term change. Companies can facilitate change in workers by relying on personal and professional coaches who understand this key principle. By embracing coachable moments, and offering safe spaces for reflection and openness, coaches can help people to reach the ideals they hold for themselves.

One of the key takeaways of the book is that when coaching is done with compassion, clients will be able to reaffirm and articulate their own personal vision. This will include being able to identify, understand, and express their personal

Following this, change must occur: thoughts, feelings, and actions will all change to be more aligned with the dream, passion, vision, and ideals that the person comes to...

…to the goal, one typically comes up with very little energy to close that gap. The long-term vision, on the other hand, can sustain a person through the change process so long as one focuses on it daily.

Coaching for compliance might help a person achieve a short-term goal but it does not, according to the authors research, facilitate long-term change. But by coaching with compassion, i.e., helping the person discover the different ways he or she would like to change and helping the person come up with the process to change and supporting them with positive encouragement along the way, a…